Question on RyanKent's Identifying Link Penalties 2012 Article
-
I have a question about this article: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/identifying-link-penalties-in-2012
Specifically the Section Titled: Other Google Link Penalties
_"Google often manually penalizes sites and does not inform site owners of the penalty. Furthermore, Google makes many algorithm changes each year. Most people are aware of the major algorithm changes, but you should also know Google makes about 50 algorithmic changes each month which could lead to ranking changes or an "algorithmic penalty". With the Penguin update specifically, we are unsure if there will be further refinements and rollouts as has happened with Panda. On May 25th Google rolled out what Search Engine Land calls Penguin 1.1. _
What advice is available for a site owner who wants to know if they have received a link penalty or at risk in the future?
Check your anchor text distribution to see if it appears natural. You can perform a fast check in Open Site Explorer of your top 20 links as follows:
- Go to http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/
- Enter in the URL of your site and press <enter>or the SEARCH button</enter>
- Change your drop down box settings as follows: Show [followed + 301] links from [only external] pages to [pages on this root domain]…..then press the FILTER button. These settings will remove the “nofollow” and internal links which are not evaluated by Google as part of link penalties.
- You will now see a list of all links to your site which may cause you to incur a penalty. For now, focus only on the Link Anchor Text column. If 50%+ of your top 10 links show the same or very similar anchor text, that is a warning sign of a very unnatural link profile. Of course, a deeper analysis is desirable but this method offers you some idea of the problem in just a few seconds.
Hopefully your anchor text distribution looks more natural than the below example. Notice how all the links show anchor text? A natural distribution would show a high percentage of links with simply the site URL. When anchor text is naturally used, it is often far less than ideal."
Anyway, with anchor text looking the same - would this have a negative impact if i was syndicating content to 10-15 blogs, or if i used onlyshare and did it to 50 or something. Would this impact me eventaully in a long term sense. I tend to write articles at least weekly for these sites so that i make sure i have fresh content, if me syndicating them/sharing the excerpt to my blog pages w/ anchor pages back to my main article is hurting me by having multiple pages linking back w/ the same exact anchor text, that would be a good thing to know. Any input on this would be much appreciated.
- Keep in mind i'm not creating 10k blogs and having one blog post on them. They are actively posted to.
With my established site they seem to work great- but with a new site, would popping 10-15 links real quick like that set off any alarms?
thank you,
-Travis Gross
-
Sorry i didn't reply sooner, but thank you for answering the question. Your article made me identify a lot of concerns and thought maybe that the practice was in fact something that may end up problematic.
I appreciate it.
-
Hi Travis,
What it all boils down to is links which are valued by search engines are the ones offering an independent vote for your web page. Syndicates articles don't meet that criteria so they should generally not be offered any value from search engines.
Ask yourself why are you syndicating these articles? Are you actually receiving any substantial amount of direct traffic from them? In most cases the answer is no in which case I would recommend discontinuing the practice.
If you write a fantastic article, the best place for it is on your site. If you wish to publish it on another high quality site relevant to your niche, that is great too. By doing such you are exposing your content to others in a quality manner.
Anyway, with anchor text looking the same - would this have a negative impact if i was syndicating content to 10-15 blogs, or if i used onlyshare and did it to 50 or something. Would this impact me eventaully in a long term sense.
To answer your question directly, yes. A lot depends on what other legitimate links your site has earned but this practice of creating duplicate links on a network of sites can lead to a penalty, or make an existing penalty worse.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Did anyone's +1s disappear?
I recently noticed that all the plus ones on our company Google+ page disappeared. Now there's only Followers and Views. Does anyone know what happens to the plus ones?
Social Media | | TMI.com0 -
Webmaster is showing hundreds of external links from 1 G+ post
A page on our site is registering as having 262 external links coming from two pages on Google+. The page it comes from is for posts related to #weddings, but I can't find the post with our link. Has anyone else experienced this? Linking page https://plus.google.com/app/basic/s/%23Wedding/related?cbp=17npa447ckmq3&sview=27&cid=5&soc-app=115&soc-platform=1&sri=0&spath=/app/basic/100121179959444544221/posts&sparm=cbp%3D16tcwubxsznm%26sview%3D27%26cid%3D5%26soc-app%3D115%26soc-platform%3D1%26stct%3DCAIQgJf0-fbDugIgCigB%26spath%3D/app/basic/stream%26sparm%3Dcbp%253Dm5w9s8yrkyhx%2526sview%253D27%2526cid%253D5%2526soc-app%253D115%2526soc-platform%253D1
Social Media | | HireSpace0 -
Twitter and Link Juice
Sorry if I am late to the party with this, but I thought Twitter stopped giving sites link juice? I have been running some sites through Open Site Explorer and there main links are coming from Twitter. I have other sites who are on Twitter and nothing comes up. Why is that? Thanks!
Social Media | | ClickIt0 -
What are the strategies in Link Building? How to increase referral traffic?
Guys please help me to increase reference traffic for a dry topic website such as automotives, insurance, real estate. I tried social bookmarking and networking but I did not find any difference I even did Blog commenting forum posting but it did not make much difference to me It increased my search rate but it not helped in my referral traffic. So please suggest me better strategies in Link Building for dry topic websites
Social Media | | PrasanthMohanachandran0 -
Share my Article Email
I am looking for some help an inspiration on a quality email for sharing content. I don't want it to be in your face please share my article but at the same time I want people to act upon it 🙂 Thanks for your help guys and gals 🙂
Social Media | | onlinemediadirect0 -
Google+ what's it like?
"Google+ is in limited Field TrialAt the moment, we're testing with a small number of people, but it won't be long before the Google+ project is ready for everyone. Leave us your email address and we'll make sure that you're the first to know when we're ready to invite more people.[Keep Me Posted] btnAlready invited? We've temporarily exceeded our capacity. Please try again soon."Is there anything i can do to get it working so i can get a taste of the google+?
Social Media | | mosaicpro0 -
What is more important, tweets/shares or traditional link building?
SMM has a presence that is just growing and growing. I'm hearing all these back and forth talks about how tweets/shares are influencing rankings more than traditional link building would. If so, would this be a short term ranking improvement, long term? What percentage would you say SMM (ranking factor) has when ranking a website in the SERPS.
Social Media | | Brother220 -
How to Position Yourself When Doing Link Building & Outreach on behalf of Clients?
One of the things we struggle with is how to position ourselves when doing outreach such as link building on behalf of a client. We know many times it is best for outreach to come directly from the client themselves so that it comes across as more genuine. However, some clients prefer to outsource the entire process. When doing outreach on behalf of clients, how do you position yourself? Are you typically transparent about being a marketer working for an agency, or do you spin it more as being someone 'with' the company? Does it ever make sense to use aliases?
Social Media | | Jeff-Hahn0